ACTOR NETWORK THEORY AND THE INVESTIGATION OF EDUCATION POLICY AND PRACTICE. AN INTRODUCTIONPaolo Landri - CNR_IRPPS_ITALYSUSEES - SUmmer School In Sociologies of Education and Higher EducationUniversity of Strasbourgp.landri@irpps.cnr.it

I AM NOT…

…..HOWEVER, I CONTRIBUTED TO THE CIRCULATION OF ANT IN ITALY

1996

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QUESTION 1

a) What is Actor Network Theory ?

A STANDARD STORY OF ACTOR NETWORK THEORY

The term ‘Actor-Network’ is the literal translation from the French ‘Acteur Réseau’. The addition of ‘Theory’ led to the acronym of ANT that spread quickly in the English speaking scientific communities. Originally, it was intended to convey the sense of relationality, precariousness, and contingency of actors and networks at a time when the concept of ‘network’ suggested a metaphor of becoming in contrast with the solidity of ‘system’, ‘structure’

ANT comes from STS (Science and Technologies Studies), an interdisciplinary research that includes philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. and was conceptualized during the ‘80s by Michael Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law (see Law, 2009). It is then a trans-national and trans-disciplinary vocabulary that emerged to adjust social theory to science and technology studies

ANT IS A THEORY ? OR A SENSIBILITY ?

ANT problematizes also the notion of ‘theory’, therefore is not a theory in the traditional and common sense of social theory that assumes an all-embracing position and provides explanations

‘actor network approach is not a theory. Theories usually try to explain why something happens, but actor network theory is descriptive rather than foundational in explanatory terms, which means that it is a disappointment for those seeking strong accounts. Instead it tells stories about ‘how’ relations assemble or don’t . . . [I]t is better understood as a toolkit for telling interesting stories about, and interfering in, those relations. More profoundly, it is a sensibility to the messy practices of relationality and materiality of the world. Along with this sensibility comes a wariness of the large-scale claims common in social theory: these usually seem too simple’ (Law 2009)

ANT IS A THEORY ? OR A TRAVEL GUIDE ?

…..’where to travel’ and ‘what is worth seeing there’ is nothing but a way of saying in plain English what is usually said under the pompous Greek name of ‘method’ or, even worse, ‘methodology’. The advantage of a travel book approach over a ‘discourse on method’ is that it cannot be confused with the territory on which it simply overlays. A guide can be put to use as well as forgotten, placed in a backpack, stained with grease and coffee, scribbled all over, its pages torn apart to light a fire under a barbecue. In brief, it offers suggestions rather than imposing itself on the reader’ (Latour, 2005)

BASIC GLOSSARY: EXEMPLARY CASE STUDIES

A BASIC GLOSSARY. ENTITIES IN MAKING: ACTORS, ACTANT

‘An actor is what to made to act by many others’ (Latour, 2005)

The approach consider symmetrically humans and nonhumans. It does not assume that entities have pre-formed characteristics, their features are always contingent and empirical, entities are propositions, namely “in the ontological sense of what an actor has to offer to other actors” (Latour, 1999). Actors and networks coevolve, and define reciprocally, therefore we come to the term ‘actor-networks’.

Objects have then agency, configure users, translate interests, are delegated to do things, consolidates relationship (technology is society made durable), partecipate to politics, are technologies for putting policies in practice. ANT brings sociomateriality at the forefront !!!!!

Actors are defined by their performances under trials (what they do in situation of trial). The term actant comes from semiotics to extend to notion of agency also to nonhumans

A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW ENTITIES CONNECT ? TRANSLATION

Callon’s stages of translation (1986):

problematisation, where a problem is articulated in such a way that the articulators can then become indispensable to the solution;

interessement, in which actors come between other actors and their desired goals;

enrolment, in which actors are assigned specific roles and relationships;

mobilisation, a process by which one set of actors gains the ability to become spokespersons for the collective

A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW ENTITIES CONNECT ? INSCRIPTION, IMMUTABLE MOBILES

A general term that refers to all the type of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized in a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace. Usually but non always inscriptions are two-dimensional, superimposable, and combinable’ (Latour, 1999, p.306 in Pandora’s Hope)

Inscriptions may be combined while keeping some aspects of the relation intact. That way, they may circulate, and make the entity mobile. They can be so to speak ‘immutable mobiles’.

A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW ENTITIES CONNECT ? MEDIATORS, INTERMEDIARIES

An intermediary ‘transports meaning or force without transformation… even if it internally made of many parts (Latour, 2005, p. 39). On the other hand, ‘Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour, 2005, p.39).

In practice, there is a constant uncertainty about whether an entity (text, technology, people, etc.) may behave as mediator, or intermediary; it depends on how it comes to be associated in the assemblages of humans and nonhumans.

The particular mix of intermediaries and mediators in a growing assemblage permits to map the relative state of order/disorder. So, the unfolding of an assemblage can move from complication (a stabilized state no matter how many intermediaries are in there) to complexity (a fluid state, where the drive to disorder leads to a growing number of variables not to be considered separately).

A BASIC GLOSSARY. HOW ENTITIES CONNECT ? CENTRES OF CALCULATION

Centres of calculation is a site where inscriptions can be combined and it is possible a calculation. These sites can be a laboratory, a statistical institution, a databank

A BASIC GLOSSARY. STABILISATION OF ACTOR-NETWORK

The associations of humans and nonhumans entities come to stabilised, and some extent blackboxed.

Blackboxing occurs when a technology, an artifact, an object, etc is made invisible by its own success. It happens when a car runs efficiently, a matter of fact has been settled, a controversy is fixed. Here, the attention is on the inputs and the outputs of the technology, of the matter of fact, on the solution as a whole, and not on its internal complexity. As a result, the more a scientific and technological work succeed, the more is a black-box

More in general, and a result of the successful association of entities, some aspects of the assemblages of humans and nonhumans become taken for granted. To underline this, several concepts have been proposed: black box, obligatory point of passage, punctualization, etc.

CRITICS: ANT AND AFTER

QUESTION 2

How to use ANT to do research in education policy and practice ?

ANT AND EDUCATION

FOLLOW THE ACTORS !

ANT accounts are mostly case studies carried out by using ethnographic projects (participant observations, interviews, conversations, note taking), or historical reconstruction (letters, documents, and other traces of the past)

ANT inspired education policy studies implied the collection and the analysis of policy documents, media reports, interviews, observation

Examples of ANT-ish tales in education policy

❖ Towards a Sociology of Measurement in Education Policy, RADHIKA GORUR

❖ What – If Anything – Do Standards Do in Education? Topological Registrations of Standardising Work in Teacher Education, CARLIJNE CEULEMANS

❖ Making sense of the educational present: problematizing the ‘merit turn’ in the Italian eduscape, EMILIANO GRIMALDI & GIOVANNA BARZANO’

• Towards a Sociology of Measurement in Education Policy: RADHIKA GORUR

❖ Australia was shocked to find itself ‘inequitable’ – it was declared ‘high quality, low equity’ in PISA 2000. However, by 2006, Australia had shifted into the ‘good quadrant of ‘high quality, high equity’ (…) Australia’s absolute scores had not actually changed, I heard. Rather, its rating changed because of a slight variation in the way ‘equity’ was measured in PISA”

❖ OECD fabricates spaces of commensurability. In PISA, the measurement of equity depends on ESCS Index (Economic, Social & Cultural Status). ESCS index= HISEI + ISCED + other PISA indicators (Social and Cultural Family Capital and Wealth). By looking at HISEI, ISCED and Pisa Indicators are fabricated, it is highlighted how the practice of doing commensurability is infused by passion, discussion, persuasion. At the same time, a work of depuration is done in the writing of the report for policy-makers. The incompleteness of these objects are displaced in the technical report.

❖ In performing such an analysis, this research is not concerned with ‘exposing’ the limitations of comparison or challenging their validity. Rather, based on the work of Steve Woolgar and other scholars, it attempts to mobilise a ‘sociology of measurement’ that explores the instrumentalism and performativity of the technologies of international comparisons.

What – If Anything – Do Standards Do in Education? Topological Registrations of Standardizing Work in Teacher Education:

CARLIJNE CEULEMANS❖Keeping track of the Flemish teacher’s profile in the course of their application within

one specific teacher training institute. Registration of the type of work done by the profile and the core competences in practices of self-evaluation.

❖Building on Bruno Latour’s exercises of socio-technical analysis, the article offers a topographic rendering of such practices. What is visualized in such a rendering are not chronologies, articulations or significations. Rather, it displays the (net)working which is necessary to enact some-‘thing’ as an assemblage or entity (Latour, 2005).

❖The socio-technical exercise shows how the mise en scene implies: a) a gathering of people to evaluate teacher training program against the standard teacher profile b) cascades of inscriptions aimed at realizing the self-evaluation in durable and mobile forms. In particular, by looking at the practices it is revealed the workings of the inscriptions (the translation of an entity in a sign): excel files, representations creating collectives of discussion with the World Cafè technique, the judgement of the inspection committee.

❖“First, standardization turns out to work by means of constant mobilization, not by stabilization. (…) Second, the list of teacher core competences, which, in various forms and shapes returns in each of the inscriptions we collected, seems to be acting on its own terms here (as a ‘factish’, cf. Latour, 2010a). (…) Third, the leading mechanism in standardization work seems not to give way to deliberation on what one is doing and why. Rather, it seems to be procedural: what it makes those involved be concerned about, is to meet up with the procedures”.

Making sense of the educational present: problematizing the ‘merit turn’ in the Italian eduscape: EMILIANO GRIMALDI &

GIOVANNA BARZANO’ ❖ This article focuses on the recent ‘merit turn’ in the Italian education

system.❖ The merit turn is described as a consequence of the mobilizing of a key set

of global ideas, technologies and authorities about the ‘modernising of education’ that criss-cross the European education space and the regional borders of the Italian education system.

❖ The picture of the emerging problematisation about the ‘merit revolution’ in Italian education is enriched describing the dynamics of the processes of interessement and enrollment through which the translation of such a policy recipe has happened in practice. The ongoing formation of a dispersed assemblage of policies, institutions, humans, technologies and materialities and the displacement of goals, strategies, actions and results are described in detail, in order to show the patterned messiness of these policy processes (Urry, 2000: 189).

❖ Finally, the mobilization of new subjectivities is addressed, exploring the implications of the processes of problematisation, interessement and enrolment for the constitution (and reframing) of some key subjectivities of the Italian education scape, namely head teachers and teachers.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ANT-IS TALE (LAW, 2009):

semiotic relationality (looking at a network whose elements define and shape one another),

heterogeneity (there are different kinds of actors, human and otherwise),

materiality (stuff is there aplenty, not just “the social”).

insistence on process and its precariousness (all elements need to play their part moment by moment or it all comes unstuck).

attention to power as an effect (it is a function of network configuration and in particular the creation of immutable mobiles), to space and to scale (how it is that networks extend themselves and translate distant actors).

QUESTION 3

To what extent ANT contributes to renew sociology of education, and in particular, the investigation of Europeanisation of education ?

MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF EDUCATION

❖ a) shifts the unit of analysis from societies to assemblages

❖ b) analyses the fabrication of assemblages and the circuits of knowledge that enact and sustain such associations

❖ c) focuses the analysis on the materialities of circuits (how they stabilise networks and how they complexify them)

❖ d) understands the social consequences of assemblages.

MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF EDUCATION:EPISTEMOLOGY/ONTOLOGY/ETHICS

MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF EDUCATION:EPISTEMOLOGY/ONTOLOGY/ETHICS

Understanding the construction of new eduscapes namely the European space of education and the globalized spaces of education.

Education policy and practice, therefore, are captured as something to be assembled (or to be recomposed) where regional spaces of education, spaces closed and bound to the nation-states are confronted with the pressures of global networks and flows of education practice and policy.

These networks and flows destabilize regional spaces of education, and enact novel and unexpected assemblages of education that need to be investigated.

❖solicits to look beyond the equivalence society= nation-state (it is post-national sociology);

❖considers the ‘social’ as heterogeneous by constitution (human-nonhuman, nature-society). It redistributes the agency among humans, objects, things, natures, etc. (it is to some extent a post-humanist sociology);

❖has implicitly a inclusive and compositionist agenda, i.e. it is not critic in the classic meaning, to some extent it is a post-bourdeusian sociology ! It inherits from the past, yet it does not reifying categories. It rather plays with the current regimes of visibility in the governamentality, by displaying their limitations.

MOBILE SOCIOLOGIES OF EDUCATION:EPISTEMOLOGY/ONTOLOGY/ETHICS

FURTHER THREADS OF INVESTIGATION IN THE EMERGING LANDSCAPE OF A POST-NATIONAL SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

❖ Beyond the comprehensive school❖ Transnational spaces of education and hybrid

dynamics of governance❖ Mobility, Space and Education❖ Knowledge, Expertise e Standards in Education❖ Sociology of education in Europe.❖ Post-Comparative Education

KEY READINGSFenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-Network Theory and Education. London: Routledge.

Gorur, R. (2015) Situated, Relational and Practice-Oriented. The actor-network theory approach, Gulson, Kalervo N.; Clarke, M. & Pedersen E. (2015) Education Policy and Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge

Landri, P. & Neumann, E. (Eds) (2014) Mobile Sociologies of Education, Special Issue EERJ, Vol. 13 (1)

Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Law, J. (2009), Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics, in Bryan S. Turner (Ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. London: Blackwell Publishing